I’m Nicole Negowetti, founder of Food For Us.

For more than fifteen years, my work has lived at the intersections of food systems, ecological wellbeing, and democratic life, helping people and institutions navigate complexity together when familiar frameworks no longer hold.

My path has moved through law, policy, teaching, community organizing, and regenerative inquiry. I have taught food law and policy at Valparaiso University School of Law, Harvard Law School, and Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. I co-founded the Northwest Indiana Food Council and later launched the Sustainable Sourcing Initiative at the Plant Based Foods Institute, convening farmers, food companies, and local leaders around questions of soil health, responsibility, and shared impact.

Across these roles, I learned that food is never just food.

It is where health, ecology, labor, identity, power, and belonging meet. It is where institutional failures become tangible, and where communities can rediscover their capacity to repair, regenerate, and reimagine life together.

Through this work, my inquiry gradually widened:

How do people make sense of reality together when shared reference points are breaking down?

What allows collaboration across political and worldview differences without abandoning material truth or ethical boundaries?

How can food become a doorway into collective agency rather than division?

These questions shaped the work developed through Food For Us, including post-partisan practice, an approach to cooperation grounded in shared material realities rather than ideological alignment.

Over time, this inquiry has continued to evolve.

What began as place-based food and governance work has widened into a broader focus on coordination under threshold conditions, including ecological instability, institutional strain, and fragmented sensemaking.

Food For Us remains part of this lineage.

Today, my work continues through teaching, writing, and accompaniment with people and organizations navigating systemic transition.

To explore the current articulation of this work:

Visit www.nicolenegowetti.com

My book, Feeding the Future: Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves (Georgetown University Press, 2026), reflects this evolving inquiry, using food as a lens to examine how societies organize care, responsibility, and belonging amid ecological and democratic disruption.

Beyond professional life, I’m a mother to two boys, an ultrarunner, and someone who feels most at home in the forest, near water, or around a fire with people exploring what it means to build a livable future together.

Food For Us has been one expression of that larger exploration.